Friday, we drove south to Madera Canyon rec area in the Santa Rita mountains east of Green Valley. There are nearly 10 mi of trails in the canyon, from handicap-accessible to steep expert trails. There are trail maps available at each of the trail heads showing the routes, and information for each trail. We did a walk about 1.4 mi along Bog Springs trail, described as a moderate easy trail. It was a nice walk climbing up through mixed mesquite and evergreen forest. At several points it had views back down the canyon to the hills behind the retirement community of Green Valley.
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| Madera Canyon |
With an elevation gain of 1200 ft in this distance, we figured we wouldn't want to try a moderate hike. Once we got high enough, we could see a large rectangular pool of water. We encountered a couple coming down, and asked them if they knew what it was. It is the tailings pond from one of the large copper mines in the valley. We also got talking about Helvetia, the mining area in the hills near here that has been closed to the public. Apparently this is due to a plan to reopen the mine, and develop an open pit. There is a movement to prevent this called 'save the Santa Rita's '. When we checked this out, we found that the company planning the mine is HudBay from Toronto who acquired controlling interest in a US resource corporation. HudBay's main activities are 3 mines in the Flin Flon area, one in southern Peru, and a 1.5 billion dollar plan to development this mine. It is currently stalled since the US Army Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles office recommended that a federal 'clean water' permit be denied. This was the last major federal permit required to proceed. Interesting.
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| Tailing pond in background |
Saturday was another cool day. We spent it inside cleaning up the trailer a bit. There was another wind storm, and since our closest neighbours were away, John picked up some chairs, tables, coolers and mats that were blowing around, and tucked them back where they would stay put. Joan chatted with Carol in the afternoon. Christmas evening, we had a nice Skype chat with Karen and Dominique.
Christmas morning, Joan made a tasty zucchini and maple sausage quiche for breakfast. After Skyping with Trev, Sue, Anthony, Taylor and James, we did a short walk around the fairgrounds. It was down to about 3C this morning, and wet overnight. The hills around have a dusting of snow on them, so we had a white Christmas.
Our walk was fairly short, as the wind had a bite to it. We saw a pretty little bird on a neighbours utility stand.
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| Vermillion Flycatcher |
On Monday, we moved to SKP Saguaro Co-op in Benson. Neighbours at Pima had given us a coupon for first time visitors to the park for $50 for 1 week, so we couldn't pass up on that. It was a little cool, just above freezing, in the morning as we got hooked up. Once we got to the park, we had a choice of a few spots, so the 'parker' drove John around to select a site. Once we had settled everything in the office, he led us back to the site. Instead of insisting on guiding us into the site, he asked if we had a 'process' for backing up, and let Joan guide us in. He did stick around to make sure we were where we needed to be. The sites are very wide.
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| SKP Saguaro rv site | |
In fact, a lot of them have 'casitas' on them, in addition to room for an RV. The 'casitas' are 300 sq ft buildings, with an upper deck.
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| Casita |
The site next door had an interesting sign.
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| Please keep off the grass |
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Tuesday morning, we went to visitor info in Benson, intending to pick up the guide to the downtown walking tour. They didn't have hard-copies, but could print one for us. However, the version they had was obsolete, as some of the buildings in the list were no longer there, so instead, she recommended we go to the museum to get the guide. After picking up a few other brochures, we headed to the museum. They found a guide for us. As we were wandering through their museum, a fellow said he was curious about the price of the guide. Turns out that they are $6, so we went back to the desk and paid for the guide. Most downtown walking guides are one or two sheets of regular paper. These ones are a booklet with 5 heavy duty 8.5x11 sheets with color pictures, and a heavier outside sheet, so they cost them a lot more to make. There are 4 tours described, two walking ones of downtown, one walking or driving tour, and one driving tour. We did the the two downtown walking tours. There is lots of detail on who had what business in them from the late 1800's until mid 1900's, and later for the businesses that lasted longer. It was a typical western town from the history, with a flood in 1896, many fires, a few shootings, one between a bar owner and his bartender. Few of the original buildings are still there. The town has a lot of nice murals.
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After we returned to the trailer, the Welcome Committee representative knocked on the door. We had a good chat with him. We found out that the main purpose of the casitas is to provide a large living room for residents. Some of them do have a kitchen area as well. People are supposed to sleep in their RV's, not in the casita's, but they can be used by short term guests for sleeping. We were curious about the Escapees club, as we have seen several references to it. Most of the people in the park are on 6month or longer leases each year. The park is owned by the people in the park. They provide some short term rentals to people like us on sites that haven't been leased or ones that leasors have put into the rental pool while they are away. You have to be a club member to long term lease, so it is more oriented to people who stay for at least the winter and spend most of their time socializing with other people in the park. There are only about 20 parks scattered from Florida to Washington state, so we don't see a benefit to nomads like ourselves.
Wednesday morning, we walked up the wash near the trailer. Soon it went under a bridge through a couple of culverts, which we walked through by stooping a bit. We had to duck lower toward the other end since there was more gravel on the bottom there.
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| under-duck |
The wash wandered up toward the hills west of the park, splitting off in several places. A couple of times we spooked hares that dashed off through the scrub.
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| Undercut mesquite tree |
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Once we got close to the hills, and the wash started to peter out, we climbed up onto one of the hills. We came across an ATV trail that ran upwards along a ridge. We decided to go back down at this point rather than heading up. At the end of the ridge, the trail went back down into one of the branches of the wash. We followed that wash back down to where it had branched off from the wash on which we came up. We walked along the edge of the hills on a path. We came across an area with really shiny, thin bits of mineral scattered around. It looked like there was a bit of mining on the hill above the mineral.
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| Desert Christmas Cactus (we think) |
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Thursday morning we did a reconnaissance trip to Huachuca City (pronounced wachuca) about 30 miles south of Benson to check out Quail Ridge RV Park, which costs $10/night plus electric. We had picked up the Discover Cochise (County) brochure, which describes lots of attractions in the area. We had previously planned on coming here. The park is fine, and we confirmed that we don't need reservations. It doesn't get busy until the Chochise Cowboy Poetry and Music Gathering from Feb 1 to 5 when they are packed. It s the 25th anniversary of the event this year. From there we went to Fort Huachuca, to see if we could get to the Buffalo Soldier Museum on the Army base. We filled an application for a pass, only to find out that we can't go in without a US citizen in our party. We later noticed in our Discover Cochise booklet that we can go to the Sierra Vista Visitor Center at least 3 weeks before we want to visit to arrange for someone to accompany us to the museum. We'll see. After picking up some groceries, diesel and cash in Sierra Vista, we took Charleston Rd northeast toward Tombstone. About halfway across it crosses the San Pedro River Riparian National Conservation Area. We pulled into a parking lot just across the bridge, and went for a short walk along the river. The San Pedro is the longest undammed river in Arizona, and other than the Colorado, one of the few in which we have seen surface water this year
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| San Pedro River |
Back on the highway, we noticed some signs on the left side of the road, but missed the turn. We had to carry on a bit before we found a road into a field where we could turn around. We returned to a trailhead for the San Pedro River Trail Millville and Petroglyph section. Since it was a drizzly day (go figure!) we took a few pictures and had lunch in the truck. We will return to do the 2.5 mi walk after we move to Quail Ridge park. We carried on to Tombstone (
see our blog from March of 2014),
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| Tombstone Courthouse |
then back to Benson. When we got back to the trailer, the temperature inside was down to 62F so we turned on our furnace for a while to get it warm again.
One of our neighbours in the RV Park has an interesting flag on his site, a union jack in the corner, and 8 white red and blue stripes. A search for the design found the following information.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Flags-of-the-United-States-1692052 .
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